Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick is one of the more divisive figures in the industry right now, but the executive wondered out loud during his D.I.C.E. 2010 keynote how he wound up on the side of the Galactic Empire.
"I don't know how this happened, but all my life I was the rebel flying the Millennium Falcon or the X-Wing fighter,” said Kotick [thanks Kotaku]. “And suddenly I wake up and I'm on board the Death Star."
Kotick then brought up one of his more infamous quotes, the one dealing with “taking the fun out of game development” and attempted to put it in context. "Sometimes that commitment to excellence, well, you can come across as being like a dick,” said Kotick. “And when I say things like 'taking the fun out of making video games,' it was a line that has been often-quoted lately, but it was a line I used for investors. It was mainly because i wanted to somehow come across in a humorous way that we were responsible, in the way we made our games in that it wasn't some wild west, lack of process exercise and that we really did give some thought to the capital being used to provide a return of investment to shareholders. So I say things like 'taking the fun out of video games' knowing full well that all we're actually trying to do is keep the fun in the process because, as most of you know, when you're getting into crunch time it becomes really difficult to meet those milestones or get things polished the way you would like, that isn't a lot of fun. That is not what I meant by it."
For his part, Kotick admits to being somewhat separated from game creators because of his business associations. "Sometime what winds up happening when you are 50,000 feet above is you can get insulated from that creative passion," said Kotick. As examples, he mentioned how he dismissed Blizzard and World of Warcraft at first, and how he met with Maxis' management and never met Will Wright or his early prototype of the game that would become The Sims.
Kotick was particularly contrite about the missed opportunity to purchase Harmonix at the same time as RedOctane. "When we were buying Guitar Hero, or buying RedOctane, the makers of Guitar Hero, we knew about Harmonix," said Kotick. "We had always known them as sort of somewhat a failed developer of music games. They always had really great ideas but nothing that was really commercially viable until Guitar Hero. And [we thought], it's a good piece of software, and if we gave it to [Activision-owned Tony Hawk development studio] Neversoft, they'd knock the ball out of the park with this.
"We really didn't even think, 'Hey we should go to Boston, and meet these Harmonix guys and see what they're up to.' And, of course, if we had gone up, I think the world of Guitar Hero would have been rewritten. It would be a lot different today. And it would probably be a profitable opportunity for both of us and an opportunity where you'd have even more innovation in the category,” he continued. "A lot of times when you get caught up in the financial details of the business, it makes you overlook what's really important, which is who's passionate, who's committed, who's inspired and where's the next idea going to come from."
2 Comments
February 18, 2010
So he back peddled and sort of apologized for that comment but I'm still not buying any Activision games until he apologizes for that mess about not supporting PS3. I passed right over Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 at $20 on amazon yesterday and will do the same for all Activision games until. I might not even get them used.
February 19, 2010
This is why they have PR people, so that execs don't have to make half-hearted apologies like this.